How I wrote The Book of Blue Daggers, pt.1

It starts in my dreams.

I had a dream about a dark book, created deep underground in the spray of a black waterfall. The ink was the cracked spoils out of the rocks, the pages pulled from splits in the cave walls. The book had power, influence, a mind of its own. It lacked locomotion, but it had no problem finding someone to carry it anywhere it wanted. It lacked a voice, but it found no issue having it’s influence felt anywhere.

So we start there.

An idea. You get them anywhere.

I had an idea of a dark book that existed in the “real” world.

So how do we create drama and conflict from this? Obviously, someone must want the book! No! Someone desparately, badly, deeply desires the book. Someone MUST have it, and of course, the catch…being found by this person is the last thing the book wants.

But how? What drives that conflict on the page? How can a prevent people from finding it? What can a book DO? It has words…words that people read…that can influence, suggest, corrupt, control.

So, the basics. A powerful book that could appear in whatever way, to whomever it wanted, for inscrutable, dark means, and had power because of it. But someone knows this riddle, and wants, needs, desires that power. But The Book resists it with all of its might.